I feel like it's improved steadily over time. I used to find it severely lacking for anything code-related, but that's improved, too.

It's not as good as Google was at its peak (and Google itself has degraded severely in quality, IMO), but it's good enough that I can generally find what I'm looking for with a minimum of effort.

I run maybe 1 in 40-50 searches with "!g" because Brave is insufficient, for context.

> stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there

Exactly my experience. I hadn't connected it to them getting rid of Bing results, but it makes sense. I've had to use the bang redirects to other search engines a lot more too, to a level I haven't had to in more than a year.

Possibly, at least for my own experience. It's much less often that I rerun a search with !g. Brave Search's results are becoming more relevant to my own queries, and Google's becoming less so. Not to mention how ads like to masquerade as ordinary Google results; using Google is starting to feel less comfortable.